Do Not Be Quick To Follow Public Opinion

It is perhaps the easiest thing in the world to do……go and be part of a crowd because there is always safety in numbers. It takes courage to want to stand out from that crowd and even more courage when there happens to be your hard earned money riding on it.

But yet if you desire to make money from any form of gambling, then you are going to have to do something that is different to what the mass population are doing. This applies to poker as well and there are too many players simply playing conventional poker now for conventional poker to be massively profitable.

In sports betting, going against cumulative opinion is not only rewarding but it is probably necessary. Let us look at the Champions League Final in 2005 as a good example. For those of you who are unaware, Liverpool were playing AC Milan and were losing 3-0 at half-time. It wasn’t just that Milan were leading 3-0, it was also the manner of the score as well.

Milan were totally dominant and could have been further ahead. People were talking at half-time about the record winning margin for a European Cup Final being broken and numerous other things and it had literally been men against boys on that pitch for 45 minutes.

The price in-running on Betfair reflected this and was 1.01 for Milan which means that you had to wager £100 in order to win £1…..in other words the market decreed this match a near certainty. Many punters actually piled into this price in the belief that they were literally almost buying money as Liverpool were essentially dead.

To wager £100 in order to win £1 essentially means that your strike rate must be 100%……this is asking an awful lot. However the smart move in this game would have been to anticipate Milan not winning this game as comfortably as the price suggested. This is the essence of trading because we could have laid Milan here and made money even if Milan had gone on to win.

You could have laid Milan for £100 safe in the knowledge that you were only losing £1 should they press on and the price never rises above 1.01. But imagine what an early second half Liverpool goal would have done to that price of 1.01. It would have jumped out to about 1.25 and you could have then backed Milan for a guaranteed profit and sat back and watched the rest of the match in comfort.

As we all know of course, Liverpool came storming back and were level by the 60th minute and went on to win it on penalties. Anyone who had laid Milan at half-time and let this bet ride would have won £100 and would have risked just £1 to do it. This is a far different proposition when it comes to strike rate as you could be on the losing side of this bet a very high percentage of the time and still end up making money.

There definitely seems to be a public perception that events that are very likely to happen are certain to happen. This as we all know is a long way from the truth. On the flip side to this of course is that events that are merely unlikely to happen are perceived as having no chance. One only has to look at Greece winning Euro 2004 as 150/1 outsiders as just one example of this. But if you really want to be successful in sports betting then you are going to have to start moving against the crowd if you want to make money.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson